Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England [Hardcover]

Explores the importance of heterosexual masculine identity in Renaissance literature and culture.Widespread preoccupation with cuckoldry in Renaissance drama demonstrates the importance of heterosexual masculine identity in the culture. Including Shakespeare, Montaigne, Bacon, Burton and Jane Anger, this text discusses jealousy and cuckoldry, heterosexual desire, the querelles des femmes debate, etc.Widespread preoccupation with cuckoldry in Renaissance drama demonstrates the importance of heterosexual masculine identity in the culture. Including Shakespeare, Montaigne, Bacon, Burton and Jane Anger, this text discusses jealousy and cuckoldry, heterosexual desire, the querelles des femmes debate, etc.To recent studies of Renaissance subjectivity, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England contributes the argument that masculinity is unavoidably anxious and volatile in cultures that distribute power and authority according to patriarchal prerogatives. Drawing from current arguments in feminism, cultural studies, historicism, psychoanalysis and gay studies, Mark Breitenberg explores the dialectic of desire and anxiety in masculine subjectivity in the work of a wide range of writers, including Shakespeare, Bacon, Burton, and the women writers of the querelles des femmes debate, especially Jane Anger. Breitenberg discusses jealousy and cuckoldry anxiety, hetero and homoerotic desire, humoural psychology, anatomical difference, cross-dressing and the idea of honor and reputation. He traces masculine anxiety both as a sign of ideological contradiction and, paradoxically, as a productive force in the perpetuation of Western patriarchal systems.Introduction; 1. Fearful fluidity: Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy; 2. Purity and the dissemination of knowledge in Bacon's new science; 3. Publishing chastity: Shakespeare's 'The Rape of Lucrece'; 4. The anatomy of masculine desire in Love's Labour's Lost; 5. Inscriptions of difference: cross-dressing, androgyny and the analc(